Thursday, 24 July 2014

It is never too late to become a hero (or heroine); Betsi Cadwaladyr (Elizabeth Davies) 1789 - 1860, Abney Park Cemetery

The
penniless and obscure Betsi Cadwaladr was buried in 1860 in Abney Park
Cemetery, either laid above, below, or sandwiched between, three complete
strangers in a pauper’s grave dug deep enough to take four cheap coffins. There
were probably not many mourners at her funeral and no marker or memorial was
erected over the burial spot.The headstone now over her
grave is new, put up in 2012 by the Royal College of Nursing and a Welsh Health
Board that had adopted her name and proclaimed Betsi a Welsh national heroine. Not everyone was
pleased to see the obscure Betsi Cadwaladr, or Elizabeth Davies as she was also
known, launched into posthumous celebrity. In Wales there were dark mutterings
accusing the former nurse of having worked as a prostitute in the Liverpool
Docks; in January 2012 the Welsh Daily Post felt obliged to defend her honour
against her detractors and calumniators, retorting that there was no evidence
that she had ever sold herself on the streets of Merseyside.

There
isn’t much hard evidence about most of Betsi’s life. We know she was born in
the tiny village of Bala in Merionethshire, Wales, just one of 16 children of
the Methodist preacher Dafydd Cadwaladr. Her poor exhausted mother died when
she was 5 and Betsi ended up working as a maid to a local family. At the age of
14, yearning for wider horizons she climbed out of a bedroom window and walked
to Chester. Everything we know about Betsi from this point in her life until
she went to the Crimea to work as a nurse for Florence Nightingale, we know
from a highly coloured and highly suspect autobiography Betsi later wrote with
the help of the Celtic bardess, Ysgafell (otherwise known as Jane Williams),
and published in 1857. Betsi spent most of her working life in service in households
in Chester, Liverpool and London. In Liverpool she changed her name to
Elizabeth Davies because, she claimed, the English struggled to pronounce
Cadwaladr. Her Liverpool employers took her all over the continent; she saw the
celebrated Mrs Siddons act in Edinburgh, visited Vigo, Saragossa, Seville,
Granada and Madrid in Spain, in Paris she saw Louis XVIII ‘come into the city’,
was in Belgium at the time of Waterloo, saw Napoleon in Vienna, Vesuvius in
Naples and was disappointed by Rome. She returned to Liverpool to become secretly engaged
to Captain Thomas Harris of the Perseverance who was drowned two days before
the wedding when his ship went down at Black Rock in a thick fog with the loss
of all hands except for a ship’s boy (odd that such a disaster rated not a
single mention in the newspapers of the time).

Betsi in later life, at the time her autobiography was published

In
1820 she worked as nanny to the family of Captain S. and voyaged with them on
the Iris to the West Indies. The following year she took up employment as a servant
to Captain John Foreman and his wife and travelled with them on their ship the Denmark Hill.Betsi made an eventful voyage to Van
Dieman’s land with the Foremans and their 180 passengers, including a terrible
storm in the Bay of Biscay, another storm near the Cape of Good Hope which
stripped the ship of three of its masts, the rescue of the 430 crew and
passengers of the Thetis which had sunk
after being struck by lightning, detours to Madras and Calcutta where she
watched open mouthed as living babies were thrown into the Ganges, a visit (inadvertent)
to an opium den and a sighting of the Emperor in China, stays in Australia and
New Zealand, witnessing an earthquake in Peru and encountering rattlesnakes in
Chile.

Eventually
she returned to London where she took up a post with Mr G., a lawyer of Birchin
Lane. It was while she was in this household that she supposedly met the
Kembles, Charles Kemble the actor being an old school friend of the lawyer.
Betsi was taken up with the theatricals that took place in the house, though as
a servant she was never allowed to join in. One day when she thought she was
alone (it is worth pointing out that
this appears to have taken place in the mid 1830’s when Betsi would have been well
into her forties) she picked up a poker and brandishing itlike a sword began to declaim a lengthy speech from
Hamlet. Charles Kemble caught her in the game and said that he had not seen anyone with such a
capacity for tragic acting since his “poor sister” (Mrs Siddons of course) and
offered Betsi £50 a night to act for him.

As
well as all this Betsi had at least 20 proposals of marriage, including two
from Mr Barbosa of Sydney who had sent messages that “he would never marry
anyone unless he could marry me.” Existing portraits give no hint of the
alluring woman she must surely have once been to attract so much attention from
the many bachelors she encountered in the course of her life and travels. She
was also left a fortune in the will of another employer, Mr H. In fact Mr H.
left his entire fortune to Betsi apart from a house left to his sister; all his
household furniture, “manythousands in
money, [….] several houses in F___ Street, […] an estate in Wiltshire, […] a farm in
Hertfordshire, […]several farms at H_____, and other property.” All this was left
to her with the strict injunction not to let his relations have anything at all
to do with his affairs. Betsi felt this was not right and told Mr H.’s sister.
In short order Betsi found herself deprived
of her inheritance worth £4000 a year. But she shrugged the setback off philosophically
and applied to work as nurse in Guy’s Hospital, a career change that was
eventually to take her to the Crimea…..

"I did not like the name Nightingale. When I first hear a name I am very apt to know my feelings whether I shall like the person who bears it." Betsi Cadwaladyr on Florence Nightingale

“…as a result of
reading one of William Howard Russell’s newspaper accounts from the Crimean War
of the suffering of the soldiers, she volunteered in 1854 for nursing service
in the Crimea. ..... She joined a party of nurses and ‘Sisters of
Mercy’ under a Miss Stanley and eventually reached Scutari. This was the main
British Hospital and was under the control of Florence Nightingale.
Strong-willed Betsy did not like Florence Nightingale and was angry at being
made to mend old shirts and sort rotting linen instead of being allowed at the
centre of the action, the Crimean peninsular. She therefore left for the
hospital at Balaclava and immediately set to work to treat the infested wounds
of the soldiers. She nursed the men for six weeks before being put in charge of
the special diet kitchen. Being an excellent cook she made sure that the
soldiers had good food produced from the best ingredients. However, overwork
and ill health meant that she was forced to return to Britain, leaving with a
recommendation from Florence Nightingale for a government pension. However, her
comments on affairs in the Crimea are extremely scathing and she had little
good to say about Florence Nightingale.”